Managers: Your employees are geographically dispersed and that presents a few basic challenges. The first and most obvious one is communication. Managing a mobile and remote workforce can make task delegation and team building very difficult but there are solutions.

When your team is close at hand and in-person, relationships naturally build, communication is easier and task assignment is as simple as pointing a finger. When managing a mobile workforce, your finger pointing abilities become, well, pointless.

That’s where having a mobile workforce management app empowers your team to stay close in spirit despite the geographical distances. How exactly can a workforce management app do all that without making your job even more difficult?! That’s what we’re to explain.

How workforce management apps build relationships

Job satisfaction is highly correlated with positive work relationships. How do we know? Science. So let’s explore how an employee app can help create a cohesive and engaged workforce.

First of all, setting a positive tone at work starts at the top. So managers, you need to actively develop your skills — high-performing organizations spend 1.5 to 3 times more on “management development” than lower performing organizations.

This means that successful organizations actively train managers to be better managers. And better managers, in turn, do twofold: build positive relationships at work while meeting the overall organizational goals.

Mobile workforce management apps can send secured private or group messages to communicate with employees. You can also create a group chat strictly for workers themselves so that they can build relationships with their counterparts at other locations or branches.

If you are are a restaurant with a few locations, you can create a group chat for managers, a group chat for servers and a group for cooks. This way, you foster professional relationships with your employees and between employees.

How internal company communication is improved

If you’re like me, you dread the intrusive and exhausting WhatsApp work group. Using a work-only secured messaging or chat option within an employee app allows managers to set the tone for the work environment — positive, negative, tense or encouraging.

But most of all, the employee app allows you to be professional and efficient. Leave the (not) funny pictures of employees with dog ears on to snapchat and create an employee chat group that focuses on your business.

You’ll be surprised, but a professional conversation sets a positive tone between you and your employees and encourages them to come to you for help and guidance using the employee app chat function.

Since great management is a two way street, apps like Connecteam also have a feedback mechanism. Managers are now using management apps to create surveys that gauge employee work satisfaction and work conditions at various locations.

How employee task assignment is streamlined

If managers were an app, assigning employees with tasks would be their feature, right?! When a manager isn’t in close proximity to his employees, however, task delegation can be challenging.

That’s where a checklist can come in handy, whereby managers create job-specific checklists with step-by-step instructions, with the option of including documents, photos or video, ensuring on-the-job compliance.

The best managers understand their employees’ strengths. We’re not suggesting you become a holacracy like Zappos and scrap job descriptions for tasks and projects only, but leveraging employees’ strengths for specific task delegation will only do you good. One way to do this is to send out a survey to employees about their particular interests and strengths, and see how you can use this when delegating tasks.

For example, if you are the manager of a retail store, and you know one of your employees sees themselves as a people-person and a nurturer, you can put them in charge of “welcoming new employees” — setting them up with new employees to mentor and show them the ropes.

If you’re worried about employees getting distracted by tasks that are outside their core job descriptions then you can even schedule specific time slots for additional tasks and keep things running smoothly. This easy delegation frees up your time, while building up your employee’s strengths and skills, truly a win-win.

As you can see in the table below, there are many factors to good management and employee engagement. One of the most important factors is a “culture of recognition” — when employees complete their tasks well, recognize them and spread the word.

And the award goes to…

Managing a mobile workforce is probably one of the most challenging things in this day and age. You are responsible for a team of people, personalities and projects.. Managers with remote employees should be given a medal for being able to juggle a million things from afar. An employee management app softens this edge by creating an easy way to communicate, delegate tasks and build relationships — key ingredients in managing a successful team, whether next door or across the pond.

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